I put the cigarette out on the ledge and the pigeon coos at me. She doesn’t like smokers. She has high standards. Just like Rebecca. Rebecca, who’s just sent me a text:
Eugenia, Harry said that you were called away urgently. Rest assured that the children are being suitably supervised. Do let us know how you’re getting on. Best, Rebecca
“Called away urgently.” Wow. Now is she really saying, “I know you disappeared to get drunk and watch TV in a hotel room alone you crazy bitch,” or did he tell her something to make it sound classy and important? Well, whatever he told her, now she’s helping with the kids, and, if we get through this, I will hear about how she rescued my children today every time I see her. Reason enough not to ever go home. If you asked me to describe Rebecca I would say, She ends text messages with “Best,” and I feel like this would tell you all you need to know.
I pound on the ledge to scare the pigeon and light another cigarette. I don’t need her avian judgment. I check my email compulsively for Harry’s response. Response to what? You didn’t tell him anything.
It took a long time for Harry to tell me about his parents. One night, Johnny had one of his Michelle dreams. “But Jeej, I don’t remember her, I don’t remember!” he said, wailing, half-awake. Holding him, I said, “It’s OK. She loves you. She gave you to me and I’m not going anywhere.” He had no memory of her but her presence through her absence was very real for him. I tried to do what the social workers said. Tell him that he was always loved and wanted whenever it came up. And it came up every time the mother died in a cartoon movie, every time there was an orphan in a fairy tale or a widower starting to date again in a family sitcom. I showed him photos, I gave him the chain with her name plate and his grandfather’s gold crucifix. He kept them under his pillow in a special box. But each time she visited him this way I was eaten up inside, worried that I wasn’t—hadn’t been, couldn’t be—enough for him. It’s hard to compete with a ghost.
That night, when he could hear my voice breaking, Johnny’s raw semi-conscious love for her just too hard for me, Harry took Johnny from me. He put him back in bed and stroked his hair until his breathing slowed and steadied. Harry had never done that before, but it was so natural to him, like a muscle memory. Closing Johnny’s bedroom door, he said, “Poor lad. It’s different but it’s the same.”
Later, just before we went to sleep, Harry said to the ceiling, “I was lucky. I had time with him. Mum hadn’t sent me away to school yet so I spent every minute by his side.” And he told me, lying in the dark while I held his hand, about the last months with his father. Doing his homework by his bedside, reading to him, eating dinner with him, sleeping on the sofa next to his bed. The months that shaped the man he became.
You don’t forget watching someone die. The gradual frailty that creeps through him until one day the protrusion of his clavicle catches your eye in a certain, devastating light. The long hours of his daytime sleeping, his slow breathing that suddenly stops and then starts again, giving you a glimpse of the inevitable moment when the next breath will be the last one. The delightful waves of lucidity that come when you most need them to, when the old self sparkles in his eyes again and he makes you laugh like he used to and you say to yourself, “Remember this, remember this.” Because soon he will sleep again and when he wakes it won’t be the same. Harry was a boy when he saw all that.
But Rebecca saw all of that too and probably much more. And we’re mothers, so I know that she shielded Harry from the worst indignities of his father’s disintegration. I know she made sure his memories weren’t tainted with his father’s dependence and helplessness, that she took care of all the intimate hardships that come with caring for the dying when Harry was at school, or asleep or doing homework so that he wouldn’t see. That’s why he can talk about that time like that, love his father like that.
I check my phone again. Nothing. I know things were hard for Rebecca too. I know that, in her way, she was a good mother; in all the ways that she thinks that I’m not. Well, I’ve proven her right today. And I know she didn’t say it out loud when she saw Harry and he handed over the kids, but she didn’t have to. He already knows.
Ascot, January 2015
The terrine is going to be a problem. Every time we come here for lunch there’s some kind of food I’ve never seen before and out of politeness I put it on my plate. So Rebecca called this thing a terrine. What’s it made of? Lamb liver, calf hearts, strawberry ice cream—all three? Because that’s what it looks like—liver ice-cream cake.
I shift in my chair and
